I’ll be the first to admit that it’s been a pretty tough few months for me. Marc Nobbs is, obviously, an alias—a creation of my imagination that I use to shield my family (and, indeed, myself) from those who would take issue with the kind of fiction I write.
It’s quite sad that I have to say that to be honest, but in the world we live in now, one really has no choice. Just as female authors throughout history have published using their initials rather than first names (such as J.K. Rowling) to hide the fact they were women, so many, if not most, authors who are part of the erotic fiction explosion that e-readers have enabled hide behind an alias. Hell, even the most famous of all those authors doesn’t use her real name on her books (No prizes for guessing who I’m referring to I’m afraid. Sorry).
I’m married and I have a young family—a soon-to-be ten-year-old son and soon-to-be four-year-old daughter. So I’m sure you all understand my desire to keep them from being associated with anything smutty I’ve written over the years. Maybe, one day, if I write a novel which isn’t laced with sex—which is something I’d like to do—then I’ll put my legal name on it. Until then, Marc Nobbs will stay separate from the other guy.
The price that I, and I suspect all the other authors that try to keep their two identities separate, pay is that there are times when my legal persona exerts its dominance over my life and my author side has to take a backseat. The past few months have been one of those periods.
Up until the summer, I’d had a good twelve months, maybe more, during which I’d been able to dedicate the time needed to be Marc Nobbs without letting it detract from being a dedicated worker and loving husband and father. I released three books (one of them a ‘re-release’, I admit) made some good friends and had a pretty awesome time.
But since before I went away on holiday in August, I’ve found my paid workload increasing. That means that after eight hours a day of hard slog in the office, followed by those few precious hours of family time when I got home, I was so completely knackered that even the idea of going online and being Marc Nobbs was draining. All I really wanted was to veg out in front of the television and then collapse into my bed and the comfort of blissful sleep.
All that means that I’ve done very little actual writing in the past few months. I’ve got a couple of chapters of “A Wounded Heart” written prior to my hiatus, and I also started work on a sequel to “The Lies We Lead” which will be called “The Truths we Live”. But both of these have been sitting on my Google Drive largely untouched.
I’m hoping that I can start to rectify that in the run-up to Christmas. I’m doing my damnedest to get back into the blogging habit—a great habit for writers to have because, far from ‘eating up’ time that could be spent writing, it actually gets those creative juices flowing. Once you get into the habit of tapping away and getting those words out, the fiction writing comes easier too.
So I see blogging as a stepping stone to writing fiction again and hopefully, it will just be a matter of time until I pick up one of the two stories mentioned above and run with them, or even start something new.
There are no guarantees, of course. Work is still hectic and I’m still pretty tired when I get home, but I think I’m learning to cope with it. Or, at least, I hope I am.
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